If you're looking for the singer, you've come to the wrong place.I'm a different Chris Brown.This is my house o'artwork.

Tuesday, August 9, 2016

Crazy pipes

When I was an undergraduate student studying art, I was stuck for a
semester with a terrible professor named Jan. The main reason she was a
terrible professor was because she was from the school of art education
that holds that teaching technique and process is stifling and limiting
to creativity, and that the student should merely be inspired to
discover and experiment and create. This sounds great on paper, and has
inspired many romantic stories about the creative life, a la Dead Poet's
Society. In reality, I find that it mostly just allows a lot of people
to get away with a lot of bullshit, and leaves others (like myself)
without the tools to actualize their creative ideas. It took me a long
time to build that creative tool kit, and I'm still working on it.

The
other reason she was a terrible professor was because she had very
strong socio-political views that she insisted on imposing on the entire
class. Not only would she preach about her ideas (some of which I
agreed with), but she insisted that your art be about her
ideas. But . . . one of her main things was about how industrial society
seeks to control nature, so she had us drawing lots of plumbing and
making etching of manhole covers and stuff like that, and I actually
really took to it. To this day, I really enjoy drawing complicated
conglomerations of pipes and plumbing, like this HVAC system at the Wild
Project, a performance space in the Lower East Side.

I
have no idea what any of these pipes or gauges or doo-dads do. I don't
know why this stuff is on the ground floor in the front of the building,
while the actual HVAC machine is on the roof in the back of the
building. And I sure don't get that red wire, wrapped all around the
entire length of the thing. Is that really how they teach you to do it
in HVAC school?